After much anticipation, it appears that the specifications and performance results of AMD's first 40nm-based graphics card have finally been made public. As it turns out, the first Radeon graphics card to sport a 40nm manufacturing process will come out sometime in April and will be part of ATI's current HD4000 series of cards. Dubbed HD4750, the new card is built using a 40nm RV740 graphics processing unit.
The first details of the new Radeon 40nm chip have been made public in a recent review article on
Guru 3D, which has managed to score an engineering sample of the yet unofficial card. The guys over at Guru 3D have put the card through its paces and provided a number of technical specifications that could change by the time the card will be officially announced, in April this year.
The new chip hasn't been designed for the high-end market segment as it will be a successor to the company's current RV730 GPU, featured in the Radeon HD 4650 and HD 4670 graphics cards. It boasts 640 stream processing units and has GPU core speed of 650MHz, although the reference core speed of the card could be set to 700MHz, when it will be launched. One of the more interesting aspects of the new product is the fact that it will boast 128-bit memory. This might sound as bad news at first, but the framebuffer bandwidth of the card will not be affected, as AMD decided to use GDDR5 memory. Consequently, this has basically enabled the card to benefit from a memory clock of 3200MHz.
The specifications on the card that was tested by the guys over at Guru 3D were not yet finished, which means that performance may vary when it will be launched. However, if the price is going to be around $99, then AMD might have a real money maker on their hands, as this card will provide users with a fair gaming experience for the price of an entry-level one. In addition, a CrossFire setup using this card will up the performance level for less than $200.
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